Christopher Ankney
Stephen Hawking Said There Is No God
Even adults stick fingers in sockets, build skyscrapers
and caves
out of pencils and couch cushions, scatter the cards
so those loved
look
at them,
what they are doing. Don’t explain why to your boy,
don’t let him see all the rules
you’ve laid out in his first years
are as permanent
as a tidied desk, a manicured lawn, a dustless
TV. Your job forbids wishing
you lived before all the woods were paved through and around.
You lived before Zarathustra spoke
and before mirrors allowed so much self-reflection.
Your job is to find a job to find a way to keep believing
there is a feeling
of more to hold on to. This journey we take
takes wave-
rings
and shoves them up a creek.
Ring, ring, ring:
make sure to use action
verbs – they will sculpt your past
into two-pages of scripture
toward a revelatory future.
Wiggle in your chair, cross
your arms so others don’t see your heart breaking
into song at all those possibilities. Draw constellations
between where you are
and where ten years will take us all.
Don’t feel bad, we all ask somebody to look
at what we made
of ourselves, in the moment
we most fear where we are.
The ocean is on top of us
the more and more we look
for the surface. At the edge
of the universe
there has to be a wall, there has to be
more than an electric impulse,
an imbalance
of ideas that one can fathom inside
one’s brain, itself an ending
galaxy.
It is very difficult, it is, to see our bodies fail
our faiths in anything
our minds cannot equate into concrete.
Rock and sand and water build cathedrals. Atom to Adam.
If there is nothing on the other side of the way, why look
for a job?
If there are not our sweet dead puppies outside
the universe, reborn,
then we must be Snow White
trapped in a mirror, hanging
on
to little but promise.
and caves
out of pencils and couch cushions, scatter the cards
so those loved
look
at them,
what they are doing. Don’t explain why to your boy,
don’t let him see all the rules
you’ve laid out in his first years
are as permanent
as a tidied desk, a manicured lawn, a dustless
TV. Your job forbids wishing
you lived before all the woods were paved through and around.
You lived before Zarathustra spoke
and before mirrors allowed so much self-reflection.
Your job is to find a job to find a way to keep believing
there is a feeling
of more to hold on to. This journey we take
takes wave-
rings
and shoves them up a creek.
Ring, ring, ring:
make sure to use action
verbs – they will sculpt your past
into two-pages of scripture
toward a revelatory future.
Wiggle in your chair, cross
your arms so others don’t see your heart breaking
into song at all those possibilities. Draw constellations
between where you are
and where ten years will take us all.
Don’t feel bad, we all ask somebody to look
at what we made
of ourselves, in the moment
we most fear where we are.
The ocean is on top of us
the more and more we look
for the surface. At the edge
of the universe
there has to be a wall, there has to be
more than an electric impulse,
an imbalance
of ideas that one can fathom inside
one’s brain, itself an ending
galaxy.
It is very difficult, it is, to see our bodies fail
our faiths in anything
our minds cannot equate into concrete.
Rock and sand and water build cathedrals. Atom to Adam.
If there is nothing on the other side of the way, why look
for a job?
If there are not our sweet dead puppies outside
the universe, reborn,
then we must be Snow White
trapped in a mirror, hanging
on
to little but promise.
--
Christopher Ankney’s first collection, Hearsay (WWPH), won the Jean Feldman Prize and was a post-publication finalist for the 2015 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. His manuscript Dear Irreverence, was a finalist for the 2026 Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes at University of Wisconsin Press.
Christopher Ankney’s first collection, Hearsay (WWPH), won the Jean Feldman Prize and was a post-publication finalist for the 2015 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. His manuscript Dear Irreverence, was a finalist for the 2026 Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes at University of Wisconsin Press.